How do ultra-Christian conservatives justify the death penalty given "he who is without sin", "shalt no kill", and so on? I've heard lines like "liberals would rather kill babies than murderers", but that's still accepting that someone is being killed outside of war/self-defense. Is it just that US capital crimes are a subset of Old Testament capital crimes, so it's fine?
so the thing you have to keep in mind about conservative political thought is, uh... a lot of the time they do not actually abide by what the bible teaches.
you can get just about any stance out of the bible if you try hard enough. everything from “kings are the only stable form of government” vs. “all people are equal in the sight of god”, “slavery is an abomination” vs. “slavery is the moral and correct thing to do”, “vengeance is the Lord’s” vs. “it’s okay to order bears to tear children to death if they mock you for being bald...”
conservatives are all about social power and appeals to authority. the bible has been an authority in western culture for donkey’s years. they naturally take it as authoritative, but a lot of conservatives haven’t actually read the entire thing cover to cover, and a lot more have only read it with their preacher’s ... interesting interpretations in mind.
most conservatives intuitively believe that the death penalty is Right and Good, because people should get what they deserve. if someone is Gross, they deserve to be punished. if someone is sufficiently evil, they deserve to die. this is a core part of their belief system and would be such regardless of their religion-- alt-righters often share this belief, for example, and they’re mostly atheists.*
and since religious conservatives look at the bible more as a source of authority/a justification for their own social power, rather than a work of literature that deserves to be analysed on its own merits, most of them believe that the bible confirms the things they believe.
if they believe, for example, that slavery is bad, they expect the bible to say that slavery is bad, regardless of what the book of philemon would tell you. if they believe that abortion is murder, they expect the bible to say that abortion is murder, and would be shocked to learn that the bible gives you instructions on how to perform an abortion under certain circumstances.
if you tell an ultra-christian conservative that, actually, the bible is suuuuper anti-death penalty, they will look at you as if you’ve sprouted an extra head. the bible is their Authority. it exists to confirm the things they already believe. if they believe it, it’s in the bible, and vice versa.
*(IMO this belief is one of the things that’s likely to make people conservative, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m distinctly nervous about the tumblr!/fandom!left. but that’s a whole nother kettle of fish.)
